‘Feather’ in Durango’s cap has gotten a little dusty

Next year makes half a century since an up-and-coming Hollywood pretty boy named Robert Wagner starred opposite a Pocahontesque Debra Paget in a cowboy-and-Indian love story called “White Feather,” which may not mean much to American audiences (it’s never even been released on video). But this northern Mexican city is already getting sentimental about the anniversary.

“We are preparing a celebration,” says Thelma Meraz of the Durango tourism office. “For us, ‘White Feather’ is one of the most important films ever.”

Moviemaking reaches back more than a century in this high-desert outpost, where craggy orange buttes explode majestically from the earth, and the pastel light that cascades off them is magical. The camera loves this place. Meraz counts 131 feature films in its history.

It was the 1954 production of the otherwise forgettable “White Feather” -- a love triangle among handsome American land surveyor John Tanner (Wagner), frisky Cheyenne maiden Appearing Day (Paget) and her jealous fiance, the unfortunately named Little Dog (Jeffrey Hunter) -- that ignited Durango’s most glorious cinematic era. Hollywood came back to shoot another western love triangle a year later, “The Tall Men,” which starred Clark Gable, Jane Russell and Robert Ryan.

For the next quarter-century, the major studios trundled their biggest stars to Durango, from Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Charlton Heston and Maureen O’Hara to John Wayne and Charles Bronson, and later even John Travolta and Bob Dylan.

John Huston arrived in Durango in 1959 to direct “The Unforgiven” (the 1960 film, not the Clint Eastwood 1992 Academy Award winner) and Sam Peckinpah came twice, directing the classic “The Wild Bunch” in 1968 and the cultish “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” in 1972. Jack Nicholson and John Belushi starred in “Goin’ South” in 1977, and Ringo Starr came to Durango for “Caveman” in 1980.

The Duke shot seven pictures here, from “The Sons of Katie Elder,” released in 1965, to “Cahill U.S. Marshall,” released in 1973, eventually buying his own ranch and receiving awards from the Durango community for his support of its schools. And to think it all started with “White Feather.” “This movie began our golden age,” Meraz says reverently. “This movie is why Durango is still known ... as ‘La Tierra del Cine’ -- the Land of the Cinema.”

Out of Hollywood spotlight

Durango’s star-spangled movie history is chronicled in the colorful movie posters and black-and-white outtake photos that are framed on the walls of the tourism office -- still officially called Oficina de Turismo y Cinematografia. There is more evidence next door, where a 50-cent self-guided tour of the Museo de Cine weaves Durango into a quick-but-comprehensive review of film history.

Beneath these proud accounts of the bygone, however, is the sense that Durango is haunted and taunted by them now. Even as Meraz reiterates the city’s far-flung cinematic reputation, she acknowledges that Durango is not so well known, anymore, in Hollywood.

“So many of the Americans who came to Durango to produce, direct and star in films, they have retired,” Meraz concedes. “Or died.” So has the American western, which went down during the 1980s and dragged Durango’s popularity as a Hollywood filming location with it.

Many of the old movie sets are still standing -- full-scale Wild West towns known as escenarios. Just outside the city limits, Villa de Oeste (Western Town) has become a tourist attraction, where gunfights and barroom brawls are staged on weekends. A little farther out, in Chupaderos, people have set up households in the abandoned escenarios, where they are raising real-life families.

For now, most of Durango’s moviemaking business consists of lower-budget Mexican productions and what seems like a never-ending succession of documentary crews -- last year from the United States, France and Argentina -- that swing through to review the life of Pancho Villa.

But Durango doesn’t want to be a historic relic, a quaint curiosity or Knott’s Berry Farm. And Meraz insists it doesn’t have to be.

“Everything is the same here now as when Hollywood was shooting all its big movies with all its big stars,” she says. “Our beautiful scenery, our beautiful light -- they have been here always, they have not changed. And if they have been here all through time, then they must be good for more than making one kind of movie, more than only western movies.”

Durango’s hopes of reviving the golden age for La Tierra del Cine started last weekend at the Locations Trade Show in Santa Monica, where a delegation from Mexico’s National Film Commission promoted the virtues of filming in Durango to a new generation of Hollywood filmmakers.

“Durango is already a part of their movie memory -- you really cannot see a movie with John Wayne or by John Huston without thinking of Durango,” says Sergio Molina, president of the commission, based in Mexico City. “Our challenge is to put Durango into their moviemaking imagination.”

Molina contends that Durango is an attractive location. He cites those wide-open and famously glowing desert spaces of the Guadiana Valley and those ready-to-go escenarios too. But he points out that the lush Sierra Madre mountain range is nearby, filled with waterfalls, tall pines and lush meadows, and dotted with hundreds of quaint pueblos.

Then there is the 17th and 18th century architecture of Durango itself, which is so pervasive and well preserved that the entire city is designated a national historic monument.

“I believe Durango can compete with anyone,” he says, “especially if filmmakers take the time to investigate -- or just to talk with us.”

Out in the abandoned escenario of Chupaderos, where Mario Hector Flores and his wife are raising their three daughters in a phony adobe cantina between wooden husks that read “Efren’s Guns” and “General Store,” folks say they would be happy to have Hollywood return again to film movies in their midst.

“I grew up here, and it was always exciting to see the movie stars -- and to work with them, sometimes,” says Flores, 31, digging out some old photos of himself as a movie extra. “It was sometimes an inconvenience, but like most things in life, you get used to it.”

Apparently so. Flores has neighbors in the Feed Store, other families live across the street in the red brick Hotel, and at the edge of town -- past the Wells Fargo Bank, across from the fake cemetery and next to the empty corrals -- children are squealing as they play on a swing set.

All of this from “White Feather”?

“Maybe people in Hollywood do not remember their history in Durango,” Meraz says with a smile, “but we still remember very well our history with Hollywood. And some of us still live it.”